Find a copy in the library
Finding libraries that hold this item...
Details
| Genre/Form: | Children's stories Biography picture books Creative nonfiction Biographies Picture books Fiction Juvenile works Biographical fiction Essais fictionnels Livres d'images Juvenile literature Biography Juvenile literature Biographies Ouvrages pour la jeunesse Ouvrages pour la jeunesse |
|---|---|
| Named Person: | Flannery O'Connor; Flannery O'Connor; Flannery O'Connor |
| Material Type: | Biography, Juvenile audience |
| Document Type: | Book |
| All Authors / Contributors: |
Amy Alznauer; Ping Zhu, (Illustrator) |
| ISBN: | 9781592702954 1592702953 |
| OCLC Number: | 1119481708 |
| Awards: | Joint winner of A 2022 Book All Young Georgians Should Read 2022 (United States) Joint winner of 2020 Eureka! Nonfiction Children's Book Honor Award 2020 (United States) Joint winner of Selected for Soc of Illustrators Original Art Show 2021 Joint winner of New York Times Best Children's Books of 2020 2020 (United States) Nominated for Ezra Jack Keats Award for Illustration 2021 |
| Description: | 1 volume (unpaged) : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 31 cm |
| Responsibility: | Amy Alznauer & Ping Zhu. |
Abstract:
"Right from the start young Flannery took a shine to chickens. They pecked around her backyard, filled her sketch book, and starred in her stories. Eventually, her early occupation blossomed into a full-blown quest to find the strangest, most unusual bird. At the same time she honed her craft as a writer, observing the true strangeness of life itself. In this gorgeous picture book biography, Amy Alznauer offers a sometimes funny, sometimes poignant portrait of the great American author Flannery O'Connor. Ping Zhu's emotionally contoured paintings give us a vision of Flannery that is marked by humor, intensity, loss, and triumph."--Jacket
Reviews
Publisher Synopsis
This picture-book biography, beginning in Flannery O'Connor's childhood and ending with her untimely death, shines a light on her love of strangeness. With its memorable opening line, "Right from the start young Flannery took a shine to chickens," the book celebrates her fascination with life's peculiarities-and death. The exaggerated scale and off-kilter perspectives of Zhu's illustrations align with the book's focus on eccentricity...The thoughtful design-at 12 inches square, as outsized as its subject-includes a type chosen because its designer, like O'Connor, had a love for drawing birds. A striking, quirky ode to a unique vision. -Kirkus Reviews Like the best children's books, Alznauer's words recognize the cleverness of their audience; they never condescend or talk down. Zhu's work reminds us that illustrations shouldn't flatten the world either. Fluent in the grammar of both abstract and representational art, her work is full of dimension and color, symmetry and asymmetry, life and breath. The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor holds potential enough to inspire its youngest readers, and to stoke the smoldering embers of curiosity in its oldest. -Plough Like O'Connor, this gangly art object of a book tracing her first forays as a writer to an outsize fascination with the chickens in her childhood backyard is a "strange bird," in the most wondrous of ways. "There was something about strangeness," a young O'Connor realized after her trained bantam drew fame, "that made people sit up and look." Alznauer pairs a grounded, authentic vernacular with a lyricism that takes flight, while Zhu's depiction of odd human proportions against brilliant brushstroke plumage stuns. -The New York Times "In pitch-perfect harmony, writer Amy Alznauer and artist Ping Zhu honor the life of the prominent Georgia author and her affinity for the feathered species. Zhu's painted scenes wow the eyes with dazzling color, fiddling marvelously with perspective and filling super-large, thick-stock pages. By studying something closely, such as the chickens and peacocks on her Milledgeville farm, O'Connor could always find "some hidden strangeness, making it beautiful and funny and sad all at the same time." (Which could also describe her fiction.) This nuanced and multilayered effort includes extra biographical material. For art lovers." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Amy Alznauer traces the writer's gothic style to her Catholic childhood in Georgia...As Ms. Alznauer writes: "In that brief moment of fame, Flannery had a revelation. People didn't want to see any old chicken; they wanted a weird one. There was something about strangeness that made people sit up and look."There's a responsive touch of weirdness in Ping Zhu's artwork for this lovely book, with its glowing colors, bold shapes, and proportions that shift between realistic and outlandish. The bright plumage in a final soaring image suggests what a strange bird O'Connor was herself." -The Wall Street Journal Read more...
